The Year in Rap 2015

Jeff Weiss details Drake’s two high-profile rap wars this year—the hot one with Meek Mill and the cold one with Kendrick Lamar—and how his flouting of traditional hip-hop ethics runs parallel to our accelerating world of nihilist-flavored capitalism.

Breaking down Drake’s two 2015 rap wars—the hot one with Meek Mill and the cold one with Kendrick Lamar—and how his flouting of traditional hip-hop ethics runs parallel to our era of nihilist-flavored capitalism

I. How a Meme Could Just Kill a Man

At this year’s OVO Fest in Toronto, the guillotine gleamed as it slashed Meek Mill’s jugular. Like a Roman emperor in a Raptors jersey, Drake flexed his biceps and flashed the thumbs down before his rabid followers. But in this modern Coliseum, Whataburger played the executioner.

Behind Aubrey Graham, a large-screen projection taunted with the fast food emporium’s tweet. It was like watching a soccer match decided by a penalty kick from a drunk CFO whose corporation had won naming rights to the stadium.

Flanked by fake explosions, Drake rapped “Back 2 Back”, a diss primarily remarkable for its marketing and method of delivery. His PowerPoint also featured an image of Meek Mill sticking a fork into an electric socket, multiple “Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” reaction shots, along with memes based on “The Simpsons”, Friday, and “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire”. Another picture depicted pallbearers carrying a coffin with the caption: “Meek Mill checked out of his hotel this morning.” The most galling (and corny) showed Meek in a white wedding dress alongside a tuxedoed Nicki Minaj. With this endless scroll of meme propaganda, Drake intended to shock and awe New York radio trolls, sixth grade cyber-bullies, and the type of rap fan that responds in the Genius comment section with GIFs from “The Office”.

It worked perfectly. Such online ephemera flattered the vanity of Twitter users by appropriating their vernacular. Drake received credit for being #relevant enough to understand the basic fundamentals of how the Internet works. But really, he just crowdsourced his comeback—a similar violation to what led Meek Mill to test him in the first place.

II. You Oughta Know

If you missed the specifics of the blood vendetta that erupted last July, it started when Drake declined to publicly support Meek Mill’s Dreams Worth More Than Money, which sold nearly 250,000 copies in its first week. Those might not be Drake numbers, but the figure is nearly double what the next highest-selling street rap album of 2015, Future’s DS2, opened with, and five times the first-week tally of the last album from Meek's own MMG boss, Rick Ross. Meek rightfully interpreted this triumph as a validation of what he stands for. After all, his biography reads neatly antithetical to Drake’s, a revamped 8 Mile set in the city of Rocky, a narrative that not one journalist has failed to describe as “gritty.”

A toddler when his father was murdered, Meek grew up amidst bleak Philadelphia poverty and a high crime rate. He eventually met his uncle, the legendary local DJ pioneer Grandmaster Nell, who mentored him early. All the classicist rap tropes are there: Philly street rap battles, blood lineage, endless cyphers, notebooks where words are rhymed past the margins.

Since dropping the Flamerz mixtape series that won him regional fame in the late 2000s, Meek’s been incarcerated multiple times, grappled with the slaying of his teen protégé Lil Snupe, and yelped frantic hard-boiled rap songs to inspire those trapped in the cycle that once ensnared him.

On the other hand, Drake is Drake. You’ve seen “Degrassi” and his bar mitzvah video. You get the gist.

Of course, dualities are never perfect. Even if Meek Mill believes himself to be the model of authenticity, his patron is a former corrections officer and his albums are scattered with lame commercial compromises. But he exists as an extension of traditional covenants—the code of the streets and the hip-hop culture he was raised on. So after receiving word that Drake spit ghostwritten bars on their More Than Money collaboration “R.I.C.O.”, Meek went in on Twitter. Theoretically, his jab was not very different from when Nicki Minaj ripped Iggy Azalea for using ghostwriters at the 2014 BET Awards.

Except Drake refused to get Azalea’d. As Funkmaster Flex leaked the Quentin Miller-penned reference tracks for “10 Bands” and “Know Yourself”, the Canadian went nuclear, as softly as possible. His first diss, “Charged Up”, used a fully charged iPhone as its cover, hardware from the same corporation that signed him to a collaborative deal in the spring. He dropped the song on his OVO Beats 1 show to make it a commercial within a commercial. To paraphrase Vince Staples, it was the first rap diss that could ever be played on an easy listening station.

What happened next remains one of the most perplexing fails in rap history. Meek sniped that “Charged Up” was baby lotion soft and that you could tell that Drake wrote it. Then he Instagrammed a photo of himself endorsing fluorescent dental gel, tweeted the letter “Z,” and dropped “Wanna Know”, a response only worthwhile for revealing that one of T.I.’s friends once peed on Drake in a movie theater.

Meek’s response was so categorically botched you would’ve thought it was handled by FEMA. It was like he lit a blunt and accidentally burned down his house. Yet its universal dismissal went deeper than just clowning a bad rap song; “Wanna Know” was a fatal miscalculation of the way the Internet and commercial rap music currently work. From the Funkmaster Flex bombs to the Festivus-ian airing of grievances, Meek wrongly believed that he could annihilate his rival by simply highlighting Drake’s cultural felonies.

But Drake flouts hip-hop ethics that often seem anachronistic in a constantly accelerating world of nihilist-flavored capitalism. He uses hip-hop “authenticity” when convenient: the Hot 97 “freestyle” where he reads the lyrics off his Blackberry; the Sprite lyrics campaign with Rakim, where he’s quoted as being on a “mission trying to change the culture.” As though “culture” could be singular in 2015. As though his “mission” involved more than just expanding the lane that Kanye left him while fostering a collective acceptance of $3,000 turtlenecks that look like they’re from T.J. Maxx.

Meek Mill failed to grasp that most Drake fans never took their hero at face value in the first place. No one actually believed that Wheelchair Jimmy was catching bodies. If Meek Mill lives by the rules of “Stop Snitching,” Drake’s fans blew up the prosecutor of Meek’s probation violation case, begging her to arrest him. Drake makes music for Instagram captions, music that only understands consequences as a plot device. Drake possesses the requisite cache of irony and self-awareness required to thrive in an era where viral content is synonymous with quality. He’s the cleverest of the basic bros, more algorithm than artist, the logical endpoint of one-percent economics constantly engulfing new markets in order to grow.

It was going to take more than calling out the creative integrity of a guy whose credo is “all I care about is money and the city where I’m from.” If Kanye is rap’s Steve Jobs, Drake is the CEO of Snapchat. So when he followed up the Golden Owl Massacre of 2015 with the “Hotline Bling” video, Drake achieved that final state of technological singularity: When man becomes meme.

Look at this photo. That’s not just Drake, Philadelphia’s own Fresh Prince, and Kanye West cackling; it’s a world conspiring against you. Snapped after OVO Fest, it circulated so widely that it probably appeared in a Better Homes and Gardens slideshow. A subsequent video almost certainly confirmed that they were all mocking Meek Mill.

It didn’t matter that “Back 2 Back” is maybe the 132nd Best Diss in Hip-Hop History. Or that Sauce Walka of Houston rap duo the Sauce Twinz later dismantled Drake with his own retort, “Wack 2 Wack”, the best diss since “Ether”. That track has a million streams on SoundCloud alone, though you probably didn’t hear about it because most press parroted the OVO Inc. spin that it was the work of a “hater” mad at Drake for reneging on a promise to remix a regional hit. (Naturally, Meek Mill released a song with Sauce Walka about a month ago, but by then, it already seemed too late.)

Drake’s whole campaign amounted to a masterclass on how to win a modern propaganda war. By timing it to OVO Fest, Drake was able to win implied co-signs from the other performers including Future, Pharrell, YG, J. Cole, Big Sean, and Kanye. The latter came up onstage and told everyone that Drake was one of his idols—essentially, a passing of the torch.

Even if it’s unclear what type of gas is in that torch, it’s obvious that the night marked a periodic conflagration, a shakeout of a new order, a better understanding of what is freshly acceptable. Since the millennium, there have been at least a half-dozen of these schisms: When the Roots backed Jay Z on “Unplugged”, the rise of Atlanta and the South, when Kanye beat 50 in their head-to-head bout, the emergence of Odd Future and Lil B, and when Rick Ross survived The Smoking Gun and 50 Cent’s revelation that “Officer Ricky” was too familiar with the sounds of the police.

With Ross, there was always an undercurrent of absurdity to his boasts. Almost no one believed that he scooped “Emmy winners like kitty litter” or that he was the biggest cocaine don on the Atlantic coast. But unless he also employed ghostwriters (likely), there was the understanding that there was a spark of originality to the delusional Scarface meets The Phantom Tollbooth fantasies that he cooked up in his head.

Legendary rappers have used ghostwriters and co-writers for a long time, but Drake’s the one to get caught. That’s doesn’t change his ingenious streak for branding and talent as an entertainer. Frank Sinatra, Elvis Presley, and Morris Day wrote few of their songs, and it doesn’t detract from their body of work. Same with Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and, to a different extent, Kanye. It’s fine to outsource your ideas, just be honest in the artifice.

Before he drowned himself in dental paste, Meek Mill said, “I don’t lie to my fans.” It’s easy to dismiss that as some “real hip-hop,” true school, four elements fanute, but that’s a large part of what the culture was built on. For hip-hop to continue to stand for anything, it has to retain certain core values. Genre lines in 2015 might be totally arbitrary, but originality remains a timeless imperative.

Regardless of region or era, evolutionary leaps happen because of those with a wild style—the combination of creativity, fearlessness, and virtuosity that forces the competition to play catch up. Young Thug can rap with brilliant weightlessness and turn Atlanta into a psychedelic Macondo, but old heads will still wrongly discount him because he wears dresses for the same reason Kurt Cobain did. Without leaving Long Beach, Vince Staples found a way to thread the needle between Ice Cube and Ian Curtis. Earl Sweatshirt barely left his bedroom and created the most enjoyable agoraphobia you’ll hear all year. They’re all vastly different artists, but they’re united by how unthinkable it is that anyone could write for them.

IV. Rich Off Stealing Flavor

How can you be one of the greatest rappers ever if no one can tell when your lyrics aren’t really you? Can you be King when your rhymes are essentially Sad Libs? This is what Meek gestured at but couldn’t properly convey; it’s also at the core of Kendrick Lamar’s Cold War with Drake.

Even though Meek was the first to specifically call out Drake by name, Kendrick’s been locked in a battle of subliminals with him since “Control” in 2013. In this year alone, Lamar used Dr. Dre’s first album in a decade and a half to lob cruise missiles at the “soft rapper tucked into his pajama pants.” On Compton’s “Darkside/Gone”, he raps, “Got enemies giving me energy I wanna fight now/ Subliminally sent to me all of this hate,” while “Deepwater” kicks off with “started from the bottom” and ends with “what’s beef” talk.

On To Pimp a Butterfly’s “King Kunta”, Kendrick taunts an unnamed “rapper with a ghostwriter” because that idea runs counter to his goals as an artist: constructing his own stylized labyrinth of personal visions, neighborhood wars, and complex socio-political ideas—the stuff that Quentin Miller can’t help you with.

Drake and Kendrick are natural antagonists, heirs to the rivalry between Jay Z and Nas: the flashy Gatsby versus the cerebral monk. Lamar firmly grounds himself in Compton, grappling with racist stereotypes, internecine gang violence, brutal police, and self-loathing. Drake sulks blissfully above the clouds. His Toronto is a flag to drape himself in—the city as CGI, a vague cold region where the strippers are virgins to him and where Travis $cott comes to visit and stays for way too long. And if Jay Z pioneered the art of siphoning new flows and slang from young artists, Drake perfected it.

As To Pimp a Butterfly attempts a sonic and spiritual séance with the past to explore the crises of today, Drake asks you pay $10 for his “mixtape.” Kendrick’s “Alright” became the de facto anthem for Black Lives Matter; your mom did the “Hotline Bling” dance at Christmas.

But it’s more than a simple dialectic between art and commerce. Kendrick’s appearance on Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” remix mars any notion of false purity; Drake has surely written a sincere song or two that doesn’t try to turn a Hooters waitress into Helen of Troy. They’re ultimately wrestling for the throne of an art form with plenty of room for both to co-exist.

With its bold-name lineup, that July night at OVO Fest could have doubled as a tribute to all the artists that Drake has stolen from: So Far Gone doubles as an 808s & Heartbreak karaoke album from a melancholy high school drama club Hamlet; hashtag rap came from Big Sean; “The Motto” is probably the best song that YG and Mustard never did; he got his roadman slang from Skepta; and his subsequent collaborative album with Future, What a Time to Be Alive, plays out like 56 Nights fan fiction.

There’s a line from What a Time where Drake raps, “Live from the gutter, I will buy this motherfucker.” For a flash, he reveals the voice of a real estate tycoon seeking to gentrify a working-class block into condos, doggy daycares, and the sort of stainless steel coffee shops where Kendrick might appear directly after Drake on the barista’s Spotify playlist. Yet as opulent self-mythology streams into the struggle, mirroring our own constant contradictions, we’re still reminded that there will always be codes corporations can’t understand and places where memes will never matter.